annashay 
Let’s be honest. Your attribution dashboard is lying to you.
You log into HubSpot, Salesforce, or Marketo, and you see the charts. The line goes up and to the right. The biggest bar on the chart probably says “Direct Traffic” or maybe “Organic Search.” You smile. You put it in a slide deck. You tell the board that your SEO strategy is killing it or that your brand awareness is at an all-time high. But deep down, you know something is wrong.
You know that a CFO of a Tier-1 bank didn’t just wake up on a Tuesday, type your exact URL into the browser, and request a demo for a six-figure implementation. That is not how human beings behave. And it is certainly not how risk-averse financial institutions buy software.
They heard about you somewhere else. Maybe in a private Slack community for finance leaders, maybe at a closed-door dinner in London, or maybe from a peer who whispered that your solution helped them dodge a compliance audit. This is Dark Social. It is the invisible current that moves the buying journey.
In our last piece, we established that you need to penetrate these hidden circles. But now comes the question that makes every marketer sweat during a budget review: “If we can’t see it, how do we measure it?”
Especially in regulated markets like fintech. We have a unique problem. We can’t just pixel everything. We can’t track every movement. Compliance, GDPR, and strict privacy laws act as handcuffs. So, do we just throw our hands up and guess? No. We get smarter. We stop obsessing over precision and start looking for the truth.
The Fallacy of the Lead Score
The obsession with the “Lead Score” is a relic of a different time. It is a comfort blanket for marketing teams that want to prove they are busy. In the traditional playbook, it looks like this:
- User downloads a whitepaper: +10 points.
- User opens an email: +5 points.
- User visits the pricing page: +20 points.
- Boom. MQL. Send it to sales.
But in fintech, a high lead score often means nothing. In fact, it might be a negative signal. A junior analyst doing market research can rack up a score of 100 in an hour. They are downloading every PDF you have because their boss told them to “map the landscape.” Does that mean they can sign a contract? No. They have zero purchasing power.
Meanwhile, the decision-maker – the VP of Engineering or the Head of Risk – might never visit your site until the day they are ready to sign. They are learning about you through backchannels, screenshots shared in private groups, and offline conversations. Your scoring model is measuring activity, not intent. And in a regulated market where trust is the only currency that matters, activity is a vanity metric. We need to measure influence. And influence is messy.
Why “Regulated” Makes This Harder (and Simpler)
In e-commerce or low-stakes SaaS, you can rely on cookies and cross-site tracking. You can follow the user around the internet. In fintech, your buyers are behind firewalls that would make the Pentagon jealous. Bank employees often block third-party cookies by default. Their internal networks scrub tracking parameters. They don’t click ads because their compliance training told them that ads are vectors for malware.
This means your “Direct Traffic” bucket is artificially inflated. Every time a banker types your name because they can’t click a tracked link, it shows up as Direct. This is actually a good thing. It forces you to abandon the illusion of control. Since you cannot track the mechanical path, you must track the psychological path.
Tactical Solution #1: The “Self-Reported” Attribution
This is the single most high-leverage change you can make today. It will cost you zero dollars, but it requires political capital to implement because it messes up your clean data. Add a required field to your demo request form: “How did you hear about us?”
The Rules of the Field:
- It must be required.
- It must be an open text field.
- No drop-down menus.
If you give them a drop-down with options like “Google,” “LinkedIn,” or “Event,” they will pick the first option just to get through the form. It’s human nature. But if you let them type, they will tell you the truth. And the truth is specific.
They won’t say “Google.” They will say: “Saw a discussion about you on the FinOps Slack channel.” “My ex-colleague at Revolut recommended you.” “Heard you on the ‘Fintech Insider’ podcast.”
How to Analyze This Data: You cannot automate this into a dashboard immediately. You need a human to read it. Group these responses into buckets:
- Demand Creation: Sources where they found you passively (Podcasts, Peers, Communities, Social Posts).
- Demand Capture: Sources where they found you actively (Google Search, Review Sites).
If 80% of your responses are “Google,” you have a demand creation problem. Nobody knows you exist until they search for a category. If 50% of your responses are “Peer Recommendation” or “Community,” your Dark Social strategy is winning. You can take those text snippets to the CFO and say, “This is the ROI of the community work we do.”
Tactical Solution #2: Split the Search Metrics
If your Dark Social strategy is working, people should be looking for you by name, not by category. Most SEO reports are obsessed with generic keywords like “best payment gateway” or “embedded finance platform.” These are important, yes. But they measure the market, not your brand.
To measure Dark Social, you need to isolate High-Intent Organic Brand Traffic. Look at your search console. Filter for queries that include your brand name combined with high-intent modifiers:
- “[Brand Name] vs [Competitor]”
- “[Brand Name] pricing”
- “[Brand Name] security compliance”
- “[Brand Name] reviews”
If you run a campaign targeting the “connections of connections” in a specific niche (as we discussed in the previous post), and three weeks later these specific search terms spike – that is not a coincidence. That is causation. In regulated markets, this is your safest proxy. You aren’t tracking the individual; you are tracking the aggregate market behavior. Did the market get louder about us after we started engaging in these communities? If yes, keep going.
Tactical Solution #3: The “Sales Loop” Verification
We mentioned this before, but let’s go deeper. Your sales team is not just there to close deals; they are your primary research unit. But salespeople are busy. They won’t fill out a complex survey for marketing. You need to train them to ask one specific question during the first 5 minutes of the discovery call.
The Script: “I saw you came through our website, but I’m curious—what specific conversation or event triggered you to look for a solution right now?”
Notice the difference. You aren’t asking “How did you find us?” (They already answered that on the form). You are asking about the Trigger Event.
The answer to this question reveals the hidden journey that data misses. The prospect might say: “Well, we were discussing vendor risk in our internal audit committee, and your name came up as the only one with SOC2 Type II compliance ready to go.”
The Insight: This tells you that your “Security First” messaging is penetrating the Buying Committee (Dark Social) before the prospect ever reaches out. Record these calls. Use tools like Gong or Chorus to transcribe them. Search for keywords like “heard,” “told me,” “colleague,” or “read.” This creates a qualitative dataset that is harder to argue with than any Google Analytics chart.
The Shift from ROI to COI
Finally, you need to change how you sell this to the board. ROI (Return on Investment) is calculated too quickly in most marketing departments. You spend $1 today, you want $2 tomorrow. In enterprise fintech, where sales cycles are 6 to 18 months, this math kills good marketing. It forces you to do short-term lead gen that annoys people instead of long-term brand building that builds trust.
Start thinking in terms of COI – Cost of Inaction. If you do not invest in Dark Social, what is the cost?
- The cost is that you remain a commodity.
- The cost is that when the “Buying Committee” meets in private, your name isn’t on the lips of the CFO.
- The cost is that you are only invited to the RFP as “column fodder” to compare against the market leader.
You are hoping they find you on Google. Your competitor is making sure they are already famous before the search bar is even touched.
Conclusion: Comfort vs. Truth
Measuring Dark Social in a regulated environment isn’t about finding a better tool. It’s about having the guts to present a different kind of report. It requires you to stand up and say: “The numbers in the dashboard are correct, but they aren’t the whole truth.”
The truth is in the text fields. It’s in the sales conversations. It’s in the reputation you are building in rooms you cannot see. Don’t let the lack of a perfect metric stop you from executing the right strategy. Because while your competitors are busy staring at their lead scores and celebrating vanity metrics, you will be busy winning the market.
